Tell us a bit about you - what is your background?

Dorine: I am originally from Wageningen, the Netherlands. When I was 18 I moved to Maastricht to study European Studies at the university of Maastricht. After my bachelor I moved to Scotland for my Master and PhD. My PhD focused on re-gional development policies and European Cohesion policy in Scotland. Then in 2016 I started working at the ifo Institute in Germany, at the Macro Economics and survey department. My main responsibility was the World Economic Survey, a survey amongst Economic Experts around the world. With this survey we es-tablished early indicators to GDP, Inflation and other economic indicators. More recently I became more involved in EUROMOD.

Mathias: I studied economics at the University of Cologne and the Stockholm School of Economics. I did my PhD as a fellow of the Cologne Graduate School in Manage-ment and Economics. After post-doc positions at IZA Bonn and ZEW Mannheim, I moved to Munich in 2017 and started working at the ifo Institute as Deputy Di-rector of the ifo Center for Macroeconomics and Surveys. My research interests are in Public, Labor and Welfare Economics with particular reference to taxation, social insurance, redistribution and inequality. A key focus of my research is on European fiscal policy.

Andreas: I studied economics at the University of Cologne where I also did my PhD. I was a post-doc at IZA Bonn before moving to the University of Mannheim and ZEW. Since 2017, I have been Professor of Economics at the University of Munich and Director of the ifo Center for Macroeconomics and Surveys. My research interests are in Public, Labor and Welfare Economics with particular reference to optimal taxation, redistribution and inequality.

When and what was your first contact with EUROMOD?

Dorine: To be honest, my first contact with Euromod was a very old version my head of department, Andreas Peichl, showed me. I forgot from which year that version was. But I was very happy that he was keen to emphasise that the most current version looks more user friendly. Then I attended an introduction course, and I am happy to report that it looks a lot less daunting than the version Andreas showed me.

Mathias: My first contact with EUROMOD was in 2008 when I wrote my master thesis on labour supply modelling based on EUROMOD. At that time, I also attended the EUROMOD introduction course in Essex which was of great help and got to know many of the fantastic people who are part of the EUROMOD community.

Andreas: I attended a EUROMOD course as a PhD student at the Essex Summer School in 2006 where I also met my co-author Alari. I visited LISER in the spring/summer 2008 and have been working on many papers using EUROMOD and am still very proud that I was “awarded” one of the t-shirts at the 20th anniversary of EU-ROMOD in 2016.

What are your main responsibilities and what is your experience with EUROMOD?

Dorine: My main task is to update the German EUROMOD model. I am very much looking forward to this challenge as I am not very experienced in this model yet. But I am convinced that the rest of the team here at ifo will support me, and I am confident that working together with Tine Hufkens will also make the first year go as smooth as possible.

Andreas and Mathias: We will guide Dorine in updating the model and come up with new ideas for ap-plications and extensions of the model especially in the context of modelling be-havioural responses and macroeconomic feedback effects.

Would you like to share any recent highlights for your country?

The German tax-benefit system is in many ways in urgent need of reform. One example are very high implicit marginal tax rates for people at the lower end of the income distribution which can be higher than 100% in some cases. On the positive side, the German short-time work scheme has worked quite well in the past and has kept employees in employment.